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The achievements in science and arts in 20th century

 

20th century, without doubts, contributed most significantly to theoretical, as well as practical applications of the science and technology, which had great and global influence on the life of the whole human society and mostly to its benefits.

A somewhat detached observation of the development of technology shows that there are certain stages in which several products play a decisive role in the overall level and trends of technology, when compared with the other products. Let us look at the main trends and achievements of the 20th century technology development:

• Beginning of the 20th century — car industry. • End of the 1930s — airplane industry and increasing demands on fuels, synthetic fibres, plastics, and pharmaceuticals.

• From the 1940s — chemical industry, followed by progress in long-distance survey (radar — end of the 1930s), computing technology (MARK I — 1944), nuclear research (atomic bomb — 1945; nuclear power-plant — 1954).

• From the 1950s — telecommunication technology and miniaturization (transistor — 1948–53), space rockets, satellites and space probes (1957).

• Towards the end of the 1970s — intense progress in genetics and its applications, culminating by decoding the human genetic code around 2000.

A great variety of specializations and speed of the development lie beyond the possibilities of handling by a single historian of science and technology.8 The same holds, of course, for the separate fields of science and technology. Specializations become more profound, forcing the specialists to narrow their fields of interest. Individuality of discoverers begins to vanish and almost anonymous research centres, development laboratories and design offices prevail after the middle of the 20th century; the prominent experts from different branches of sciences are concentratedthere and work often on parts of large-scale projects, often secret ones, for military, global-political, or commercial-competition reasons.

Several examples: Nazi Peenemünde, American Manhattan project, the whole NASA research, Soviet Atommash and vast nuclear research connected later only with the names of Kurchatov and Sakharov, similarly as the Soviet spacecraft research with Korolyov and German and American one with von Braun. Similarly, the research is carried out in many secret and unnamed factories and also in traditional design offices, e.g. Messerschmitt, Tupolyev, Antonov, Mila, Sikorsky; despite the large work teams of designers, the names of the leading designers persist, similarly as in Boeing, Airbus and other car, electro-technical, chemical, metallurgical, and machine works. In the 20th century, new science disciplines appear which are progressively utilized both in the technical and research establishments, and which, eventually, manifest themselves in mass production in many unthought-of applications. Both the Planck quantum hypothesis, which originated from the problems of optics, and the Einstein relativistic physics, born from cosmological impulses, had to wait first to be verified and accepted by the scientific community; nevertheless, they became later basis for the newest technical inventions of the 20th century. Starting with the discovery of radioactivity, science focuses its efforts on the problem of structure of matter and the individual research results lead to more and more accurate models of atom and its nucleus. In the 1940s, the early hypothesis of the release of energy in nuclear reactions is proved experimentally. Unfortunately enough, the first applications were negative, i.e. of a destructive character.




Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1301


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